Absolu Aventus
Creed (2023)

Excellent fruity Aventus opening. Plenty of spice and zing from the ginger, it has some sparkle and bubbly qualities. Dries down quickly and seems to disappear when you smell it up close but I can still smell it in the air for a few hours.

This smells great I'm surprised at the performance that I'm getting off my skin. It seems to fade quickly and go away after a few hours. I even asked my wife if she noticed it or could still smell it and she said no.

It is an overall worse interpretation of Aventus that adds Sauvage Elixir's spices to the mid and drydown. It also smells very low quality - worse than CDNIM EDP for over 10x the cost. It does NOT smell like Sauvage Elixir, it just steals some of the drydown. This honestly smells like some mall shop "twist" fragrance.

Considering the fragrance and ignoring the price gouge, this is a solid neutral. But if my rating is answering "should you buy this" it's two thumbs down.

Aventus plus ambroxan, like Sauvage et al mixed with Aventus then dialed back a few notches unless you overspray.
Not worthy of the name - in fact it is something I would expect from a copy house trying to make a pleasing fragrance based on what is popular.

Wow this smells really good. Like Sauvage elixir with pineapple. It's a real shame culturally speaking Creed charges so much and seems to just keep charging more. I'm sure it's great for the shareholders though.

The good news is this doesn't suck; the bad news is it isn't this epiphany-causing revelatory experience either, and that's because Absolu Aventus by Creed (2023) is the ultimate example of playing it safe for the house of Creed under its third owner in as many years. Run by Kering as their first perfume brand kept in-house (rather than licensed out to the likes of Coty), Creed moved swiftly from Blackrock's hands into Kering's without so much as a peep, doubling its value merely for existing under Blackrock's ownership, like how corporate ghouls wish everything would be so they could just become (more) rich by owning things and drawing breath alone. Sentiments of "Nouveau-Feudalism" aside, what I see in Absolu Aventus is a paint-by-numbers exercise of how to please your most hardcore audience, which in most areas of commerce actually is -not- the group that spends the most money on your products; but with Creed's affluenza-stricken cult of trust fund numpties, they buy everything in triplicate the moment it hits shelves, then buy it again with the slightest rumor of change. Thus, Absolu Aventus is a fragrance that checks all the "Aventus Reddit Troglodyte" boxes. Is it limited to a single batch? Yes. Is it appreciably more-expensive than any other form of Aventus (barring vintage)? Yes. Is it mostly the same but different in enough ways to spur on endless debate and obsession? Yes. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

By now, most of you reading my reviews regularly are familiar enough with the original Creed Aventus (2010) and its many imitators, competitors, and also-rans, to have smelled every facet of this "absolu" version somewhere else. The opening is a bit darker and spicier, with black currant, pink pepper, and ginger being added to the mix, although the pineapple note created mostly by allyl amyl glycolate is still here, listed or not. Cardamom and cinnamon are dosed low, but continue to build a mulled facet to the heart of Absolu Aventus, which eventually lands us on a base of familiar birch laced with patchouli, vanilla, ambroxan, vetiver, and labdabum. Here, there is a thicker sandalwood note, and a creamier musk profile that reminds me somewhat of fragrances like Cedrat Boise from Mancera (2011) and Hacivat by Nishane (2017), both fragrances that do not try to "clone" Aventus so much as compete with it using a different olfactive angle to approaching the same subject. I know, I know, now things have really come full circle with the imitated imitating the imitators, alliteration aside; although it bears mentioning that Creed made most of its early fortunes plucking unused mods from designer briefs, or rejected fragrances altogether, giving them a "luxury" shoe shine and stiff upcharge. Thus, it is nothing if not poetic to see such a free-for-all cannibal-fest happening surrounding Creed and its most-direct competitors. Performance is adequate.

Most of the strictly-limited 10,000 bottle run will find homes with collectors, who may just sit and never open them, or buy a bottle to use, and a bottle to "invest". I highly doubt there will ever be exactly 10,000 individual people each getting their own bottle to cherish, as this sort of marketing ploy is for the obsessive-compulsive hoarder segment of the fragrance market to begin with, sadly. Creed know what they are doing, and once everyone talks this up into godhead, just like they did with Creed Windsor (2009), they will quietly re-issue the scent with a slight twist under a different name or as another flanker of the Aventus range; so we shall see our Creed Royal Mayfair (2016) equivalent of this at some point, lest Creed stick to their word with no future re-releases and let competitors clone it to death, taking money out of their pockets. Tumi is already circling the waters with the startlingly-similar 19 Degree by Tumi (2023), which feels like a mod from the same brief that generated this fragrance, sold for a big chunk of change, but still less than what Creed wants for Absolu Aventus. Beyond collector's fodder for the die-hards and a source of endless mean-spirited arguments for the over-privileged but under-sexed man-children that haunt Facebook, YouTube, or Fragrantica reviews, Absolu Aventus seems to have no other meaningful purpose to exist, although to say it doesn't smell nice would be dishonest. A lot of other things smell nice too, and don't carry nearly as much of price tag or emotional baggage. Neutral